Alibaba to invest 380b yuan in Cloud, AI

Agencies and staff reporter

Alibaba (9988) said yesterday it plans to invest at least 380 billion yuan (HK$407.13 billion) in its cloud computing and artificial intelligence infrastructure over the next three years.

The Chinese e-commerce giant had said it had plans to invest in the sector while announcing its results on Friday, but did not provide an exact figure at the time.

The company had reported revenue of 280.15 billion yuan for the three months ended December 31, marginally ahead of analysts' estimates.

Alibaba said the total investment amount exceeds the company's spending in AI and cloud computing over the past decade.

The company has kicked off 2025 as a winner in China's AI race, drawing in investors with strategic business deals. Its stock has risen nearly 67 percent this year, as of last close.

Other Chinese firms have also been investing into the sector, with ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, earmarking over 150 billion yuan in capital expenditure for this year, much of which will be centred on AI.

However, US tech giant Microsoft has begun canceling leases for a substantial amount of data center capacity in the US, a move that may reflect concerns about whether it's building more AI computing than it will need over the long term, TD Cowen said in a report.

Wall Street has begun to question whether such investment is running ahead of reality, particularly after Chinese upstart DeepSeek unveiled a model trained for a fraction of the cost of many of its rivals. But many of the industry's biggest names - including Nvidia Corp's Jensen Huang - continue to argue that AI will simply transform the tech landscape.

In other news, Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek announced the commencement of its "Open Source Week" with the initial release of FlashMLA.

FlashMLA is an efficient multi-head latent attention decoding kernel optimized for Hopper GPUs, designed to process variable-length sequences and is currently deployed in production environments, according to the company.